


Been Down So Long

by BlindSwandive



Category: Supernatural
Genre: (but not like that tag is usually used), Blood As Lube, Blood Drinking, Blood Kink, Bloodplay, Captivity, Choking, Dark, Demon Blood Addict Sam Winchester, Denial, Dissociation, Episode: s04e21 When the Levee Breaks, Fist Fights, Hallucinations, Handcuffs, Humiliation, Insufficient Lube, M/M, Mutual Pining, Non-Consensual Bondage, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Rough Sex, Sam Winchester Detoxing From Demon Blood, Sam has abandonment issues too, Season/Series 04, Self-Doubt, Self-Esteem Issues, Stockholm Syndrome, Unsafe Sex, Violence, corrective rape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-26
Updated: 2019-06-26
Packaged: 2020-05-20 10:30:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19374886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlindSwandive/pseuds/BlindSwandive
Summary: After Sam escapes the panic room, Dean gets the drop on him in the Honeymoon Suite and resorts to extreme measures to get him off of the demon blood.





	Been Down So Long

**Author's Note:**

  * For [interstitial](https://archiveofourown.org/users/interstitial/gifts).



> Written as part of [Nonconathon](http://nonconathon.dreamwidth.org) for [Interstitial](https://archiveofourown.org/users/interstitial) with boundless love. Huge gratitude to my [amazing beta.](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wings_of_crows/pseuds/wingstocarryon)
> 
> (Also fills the SPN Kink Bingo square rough sex, though that's a bit of an understatement.)

Sam hits Dean twice for every one blow Dean lands. It almost feels like sparring, bright and easy and never really a threat; there is power singing in his veins, burning him up from the inside-out with that fire that feels like invincibility. His body is strong again, the nausea and sweats and sickness of the days before evaporated like fog in sunlight. Nothing hurts, anymore, outside of the soft place in his belly where Dean calling him a “monster” is gnawing at him, sick and low. 

...“Monster” hurts. 

Sam tastes bile and swings so hard that when Dean parries he almost over-balances, and the elbow Dean lands in his solar plexus knocks him back breathless. The back of Sam’s skull collides with the mirror on the wall and he hears the glass crack. 

Through the sting of his scalp splitting and the spark of Ruby’s blood in his veins, through even the adrenaline rush and the shock of the wind being knocked out of him and the smell of Dean too close, too strong, the anxious part of Sam’s brain still offers that glass is what happens when sand melts in lightning, that it shatters into fragments that small—that he’ll be digging sand-grain-sized shards of glass out of his hair for weeks if he lives that long, that every time he washes his hair the tips of his fingers will find tiny little points of agony, will come up bright with infinitesimal dots of blood. He knows he’ll have to soak in a deep tub to get the dust of the mirror glass out if he doesn’t want to be shaved behind a curtain in a shitty urgent care in Cold Spring, Minnesota by a nurse who hasn’t slept in thirty-four hours and couldn’t care less about how his hair looks going into the end of the world. He wonders if he’ll have time tonight to use the oversized tub in the honeymoon suite he’s shared with Ruby or if he’ll have to go bleeding and full of splintered glass into the end of the world.

But that flood of wondering is not what gives Dean his opening. 

No; the molecular composition of glass and the automatic constellation of likely fallout of any given event is background noise, the kind of static he’s been swallowing since he kept getting detention for “outbursts” in second grade. Sam could recite the bones of the body, the periodic table, the state capitals in alphabetical order, “Hiawatha” or “Harlem” or “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” without losing his stride; he’s had twenty years experience.

What gives Dean his opening is the rasp of Dean’s callouses on Sam’s throat, the way they catch on the ghosts of non-existent bruises left there by a nightmare twenty-four hours and two hundred miles ago. It’s half a breath, a space just big enough for Sam to remember the hallucination and the sick-sweet see-sawing it left in his gut. Dean gets his opening when that grip on Sam's neck makes something inside of Sam go still and small and quiet. 

"It wasn't real," he says stupidly, and the hesitation is tiny, a stutter in the mile-a-minute stream of Sam’s consciousness, but it's all Dean needs, and Sam's head is being smashed back into the wall hard enough that everything goes black.

• • •

Sam wakes up concussed and groggy, his mouth cottony and a swimming sensation behind his forehead. For a moment his proprioception is shot to hell and he can’t find his limbs, his body, feels like he’s floating on water, or on nothing.

Something warm and wet is swiping over his scalp. He thinks “Dog,” thinks of Bones licking his scraped knees in Flagstaff, smiles dizzy into something soft. “Good boy,” he mumbles, and the swiping freezes.

“Awake,” Dean says, gruff, and with a cold lurch in his stomach Sam suddenly remembers exactly where he is, tries to reach for the gun under his pillow and is jerked to a halt by steel. There is no gun to find under this pillow, and his wrists are locked in handcuffs up by his head, anyway, the chain looped around something he can’t see. He’s turned the wrong way around, feet at the headboard, head and hands at the foot. 

“Getting tired of waking up in cuffs, Dean.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, a growl, “and I’m getting tired of you disappearing _over and over_ to suck down demon blood. So if I gotta lock you down until it’s out of your system, then that’s exactly what I’m gonna do.”

Sam scoffs. “And that worked out so great the last time.”

“Yeah, well,” Dean says, begrudging, and the soft, wet swiping has started again—Dean is cleaning the blood and glass from his scalp—“this time I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

“Great,” Sam mutters, “you’ll get a front row seat to the psychological torture and vivisection.”

That freezes Dean behind him. That struck a nerve. _”Vivisection?”_

“Yeah, Dean,” Sam says, and jerks against the cuffs. The anger bubbles up in his gullet and he smiles bitterly. “You remember Alistair, don’t you, Dean? You remember what it feels like to have him strap you down and use that scalpel on you while you scream and no one listens. While _no one comes to help,_ ” he spits, and it’s like venom, like the poison in him is dripping from his teeth.

“What the fuck, Sam?” Dean whispers, and he sounds shaken to the core.

“ _That’s_ what your helpful little detox program did to me, Dean. I hope you’re happy with yourself,” he adds, unable to resist grinding his heel into the wound. “In the last twenty-four hours I’ve been sick, strung out, retching bile, haunted by ghosts, cut apart, raped, anything to make it hurt too much to go on, and my own brother didn’t lift a goddamn finger to help me. The ‘demon bitch’ did—not you. Too hung up on whether or not I’m a monster to help your own flesh and blood.”

Sam doesn’t know what he expected to achieve with that, but Dean’s fist wrenching tight in his hair, yanking his head back, isn’t it. Then Dean is there, inches away, his face full of seething and loathing and fear, so much fear. One eye is swollen and dark with a cut beneath it, from their tussle last night, and his lip is split, but Sam can only barely see it because his eyes have started to water with the way his hair is pulling against the cuts in his scalp.

“You listen to me, Sam,” Dean says, hoarse, “I love you more than breathing. Why the hell else do you think I’d do this? Losing—“ Is his voice choking up? “Losing you to this,” Dean pushes on, “having you turn into some kind of goddamn monster and never getting my baby brother back, that just ain’t something I’m willing to risk. And I will do anything— _anything_ —I have to do to keep that from happening.” 

There is no doubt in Sam’s mind that he means it. It doesn’t soothe the rush of dread that accompanies the desperation in Dean’s voice, though. 

Last night, when he was detoxing in the panic room, there was something hollow and ringing in Dean’s voice, a warping of the scene like Sam was seeing it all in a fisheye mirror, but here, now, Dean is solid, unbending, full of fire and terror. This is the Dean Sam knows is at the end of his rope. This is the Dean that is desperate enough to do something blindingly stupid to save him, the same Dean who would step in front of a bullet for him, the same Dean he lost to a demon deal. And suddenly Sam is afraid.

“Dean,” he says, uneasy, “let’s—let’s talk about this, okay? You don’t have to keep me locked up, we can just—“

“No, Sam,” Dean says, sharp, tightening his hand in Sam’s hair, and the itching tickle down his scalp tells Sam he’s bleeding again. “I love you but there’s no way in hell I can trust you, you know that.” And that hurts more than his head, more than his wrists where the cuffs are digging in—he hadn’t noticed how hard he was pulling on them, until now—and Sam closes his eyes and aches.

“That’s great, Dean,” he says, grim. “That’ll be a real comfort to us both when the detox kills me and Lilith breaks the final seal and lets Hell out on earth.”

“Not gonna let that happen,” Dean says, letting go of his hair abruptly, before swiping at the blood one more time with the washcloth and climbing off the bed.

Sam laughs, mirthless. “Pretty sure there’s no methadone for demon blood, Dean.”

“No,” Dean agrees, and Sam cranes to see him pulling out his phone, walking away toward the bathroom, “but maybe we can wean you down instead.”

• • •

Sam doesn’t know who Dean called or how they managed it, but in four hours there’s a knock at the door and Dean comes back into view with a duffle bag and a plastic jug so full of blood Sam’s mouth waters. He hates himself for that a little, and he knows his nostrils are flaring—he can smell it, smell it ten feet away and through the plastic—but it doesn’t make him want it less. Ruby’s blood is still in his system, weak but there, but the craving never goes away, not unless he’s got a full stomach and her taste still in his mouth. Sometimes not even then.

His cock is fattening up uncomfortably against the zipper of his jeans. He hates himself for that, a little, too. He writes it off as Pavlov’s erection—he almost never drinks Ruby’s blood without drilling her into the nearest surface—but Ruby’s isn’t the body he’s thinking of, right now, her hands not the hands he imagines in his hair, tipping his head back while blood and power trickle past his lips. Isn’t even the body he’s thinking of when he’s with Ruby, half the time. 

It’s a good thing Dean doesn’t seem prepared to make eye contact, right now. Sam’s not sure he could stand to be seen that way. Seen through.

In the four hours that have passed, Dean hasn’t spoken to him once, hasn’t let Sam bait him into conversation. He did finish cleaning the blood and glass from Sam’s hair, sealing the worst wounds in his scalp with superglue, and when Sam complained of needing to piss, Dean wordlessly brought him the ice bucket. Sam had decided he didn’t need it that badly, yet, after all. His feet still seemed to be free, so he thought he might be able to reorient himself enough on the bed to be able to reach to get his pants open and his dick out, but any commotion brought Dean into sight in moments and he didn’t particularly want to be watched for that activity if he could avoid it. So he waited, not sure what else to do. He rolled over when one shoulder went numb, silently tried to shift the pins inside the handcuffs with his mind, but found he’d waited too long, should have tried when the blood was fresher in his system. He blamed the concussion for not thinking of it earlier; he was fairly clear, but now and then thoughts have been slipping through his fingers like sand and he doesn’t notice losing them until they come back around ten or twenty or thirty minutes later.

Now, with his mouth watering at the sight of some anonymous demon’s blood, he’s not even sure if he’d be able to do something so precise with a belly full—not without time and practice. He’s been training for demons, this year, not for escapes. Escaping was never the part he was concerned about, couldn’t afford to be; saving the world had to come first. Even if it meant his life.

“You’ve got to let me go,” he says to Dean, not for the first time tonight.

Dean at least speaks to him, this time.

“Not ’til you’re better, baby bro.”

Sam lets some of his frustration out in a huff. “There’s bigger things than this, Dean. Bigger things than me. Let me go—give me that jug and let me go,” he amends, “and I can kill Lilith, stop this thing in its tracks.”

Dean still won’t look at him, but he’s close enough that Sam can see him shake his head. “Not at the risk of your soul. I’m on call for angel duty, kid, I’ll take care of it. Gotta let me.” Dean rubs across his mouth, a nervous gesture full of weariness that Sam’s seen him make since he was way too young to have so much weight on his shoulders. “I’ll take care of it,” he repeats, a little faint, “take care of you, too.”

Sam doesn’t think he likes the way Dean says that. That grim resolution is ugly to see, sits like a stone in his gut and a lump low in his throat. He swallows at it and looks away.

“At least let me up to piss, man, treat me like a person.” He wants the chance to break out, but it really is getting desperate, now, too.

“Gave you a bucket,” Dean says absently, starting to pace, like he’s gearing himself up for something. Sam doesn’t want to know what.

“Yeah, and how am I supposed to use it? Can't you at least undo a hand?”

Dean doesn’t, but he stalks over and opens Sam’s pants for him—Sam's belt is gone, he’s not sure where—pulling out his half-hard dick for him like it might bite. “Edge of the bed,” he barks, holds the bucket there, and turns away for an illusion of privacy.

Sam splutters indignation but Dean ignores it and threatens to take the bucket away, so red-faced and mortified, Sam does as he’s told and tries not to let himself look as sick and humiliated as he feels.

Dean leaves long enough to empty the bucket in the toilet, but he’s back before Sam can make any headway on the cuffs or whatever they’re looped around. Dean stuffs him back in his shorts with a grimace but doesn’t bother to zip him up and Sam would roll his eyes if he could get himself to look up from the bedspread.

“Time to get some shut-eye,” Dean says, like it hurts, and Sam is bewildered about why until Dean comes up from the duffle with ankle cuffs and a bottle of pills.

“Bullshit,” Sam says, latching onto anger so he won’t panic.

“We both need sleep,” Dean insists, still not looking him in the eye, “and I can’t sleep without knowing you’re locked down. And for all I know you could start getting the DT’s in the night and you ain’t gonna want to be awake for that anyway. Open up,” he orders, twisting open the bottle and shaking out a pair of small pills, and then after a hesitation, a third.

“Bullshit,” Sam repeats, and prepares to fight.

“Should’ve strapped you down first,” Dean mutters, and dumps the pills on the nightstand, closing the bottle and tossing it back into the duffle. Sam is already kicking by the time Dean has climbed up onto the bed with him, but then Dean’s entire weight is on his legs and he’s using the comforter as a swaddle, tangling Sam up until he’s stuck enough that one cuff and then the second can be latched on. Sam manages to buck Dean off, knocking him from the bed, but the damage is done and Dean loops a length of something from the chain between Sam’s ankles down around the legs of the nightstand, and Sam is pulled up short.

Sam throws every invective he can think of at his brother, almost in a fugue of obscenity, and some of it must be pretty foul because even Dean looks surprised. But once he’s got himself off the floor and has the pills scooped into his palm, Dean's face has shut down again and he doesn’t wait for Sam to settle, doesn’t wait for him to stop yelling, just climbs up and straddles his chest and prepares to stuff the pills down his throat. 

Sam closes his mouth fast, screams ‘don’t you dare’ with his eyes, but Dean’s face stays grim and determined and oddly calm. One of Dean’s hands comes toward his face so Sam sucks a breath fast, anticipating his nose pinching closed, but Dean’s hand digs into his windpipe instead, cuts off his breath so fast that the surprise drops his mouth open faster than the need for air would have. He chokes on the pills, and Dean lets up on his throat but covers his mouth while he thrashes, tries to spit, tries to bite, and he's half sure that Dean's getting hard on top of him. When Sam keeps fighting, a muscle in Dean’s jaw twitches and he finally snaps, “I’ll let you wash it down with blood if you’ll swallow the damn things.” 

And Sam doesn’t want to fall still, he tries to not, but it happens anyway. He doesn’t need the blood yet—not quite—but Dean is going to win this fight eventually, and Sam would rather have more demon in his system to go into the night with than less. Maybe his body catches onto that before his brain.

“Yeah, thought so,” Dean says, bitter and dark. “You spit those out and I’ll forget the pills and just knock you out with my damn fist, capisce?”

Sam nods slightly, and breathes easier when Dean climbs off. He’s dry swallowed more pills in his life than he’d ever care to remember, but when Dean returns with the jug he opens his mouth like a baby bird, plaintive and pliant and hating it but not enough to stop himself.

The disgust on Dean’s face is so visceral Sam almost feels ashamed. Almost. 

It’s not enough—it never is—but Sam swallows the pills with the trickle Dean gives him hungrily, tries to lick up the tiny droplets that have splashed over onto his cheek while Dean caps the jug and sets it out of sight. Dean checks his mouth when he comes back, makes him stick out his tongue and peers until he’s satisfied, and Sam wants to hit him so bad he burns with it.

“Now go to sleep,” Dean says, circling to snap the lights off in the room one at a time.

It will be impossible, Sam’s certain; the blood always makes him feel wired, awake and alive, and even with that big a dose of pills, he doesn’t expect to sleep any time soon. Still, he’d rather be alone in the dark with his thoughts than under Dean’s watchful glower.

He’s not expecting it when Dean climbs onto the bed behind him, though.

“Seriously?” he says, and he hates that his voice sounds shaky. Dean is too close, can’t be this close with the blood still on Sam’s tongue and his cock stirring in his shorts, not when Sam can smell his aftershave and feel the ghost of Dean's hard-on over his sternum. Not with the soreness still in his throat from Dean gripping him there, stirring the memory of his brother climbing on top of him in the panic room up to the surface of his mind, lurid with hallucinogenic detail.

“Yeah, seriously,” Dean says, and Sam feels his breath tickle the hairs on the back of his neck, standing them on end. “You try any shit in the night I’m gonna be close enough it wakes me up. Now shut up and go to sleep,” he repeats.

“Never gonna sleep with you staring at me,” Sam tries, a little desperate. He curls around the throb in his groin as much as the cuffs will allow.

Dean sighs. “That’s why you got the pills. At least try for me, okay, Sammy?” And this last is so unexpectedly gentle that Sam is surprised by how soft it makes him feel, the deep memory of falling asleep against Dean’s side again and again as kids on the road overtaking him. Back when he believed, when he _knew,_ that Dean would never reject him.

Sam is silent for a long moment. “Okay,” he says, finally, small, and there’s a tender brush of a hand over his hair and he aches, his eyes falling shut. In spite of the hard-on and the buzz and the cuffs, the drugs swallow him down in minutes, with the even tilt of Dean’s breathing soothing him under like waves.

• • •

Sam wakes to the smell of breakfast and the sound of Dean muttering, agitated, into the phone. It takes a while for the muzziness of the drugs to come off, and he feels vaguely stoned, but not nearly as shitty as he was expecting, all things considered. He thinks his sleep has been infected by the withdrawals, though; he was convinced at least twice in the night that Dean was molded up against his back, arm slung around Sam's belly and dick hard in his jeans, digging into the back of Sam's thigh, but in the light of day that feels too much like a dream to believe. He sighs and rolls to his other side, seeking out the food by smell.

Eggs, toast, bacon, and coffee are all on a tray within reach. There’s nothing he could use to pick the cuffs—no knife, no fork, not even a toothpick—but Dean left him a spoon for the eggs, and Sam rolls his eyes. Still, he’s not going to risk letting his strength fail him. The food is tepid and the itch of need is in his veins, so Sam suspects he slept well into the morning, and he’s going to need a hit of the blood soon or the pain will start. It’ll only be worse if he’s weak from hunger. And if Ruby turns back up and tussles with Dean, he’s going to have to be ready to fight and move. Fast.

Dean’s pacing again when he hangs up, under a dark cloud so heavy Sam can practically see it storming, almost smell the ozone. 

After breakfast, Dean leaves Sam’s ankles and wrists cuffed but unchains him from the bed long enough to use the toilet with some degree of privacy, even if the door is open and Dean will see him moving in the mirror if he tries anything. Sam considers it anyway, but for the moment doesn’t think it’s an opportunity good enough to risk losing bathroom privileges over. Maybe if he acts calm and sane enough, he can talk Dean down. Maybe Bobby will realize how crazy Dean’s being and turn up. Maybe Ruby will… Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Sam washes up, brushes his teeth, and tenderly fingers through his hair for any missed glass but doesn’t find any. He can’t even guess how long Dean must have spent cleaning him with that cloth to have managed that, but he finds himself grateful for a moment until the bizarreness of that thought shakes him out of it. 

This is still insane, he reminds himself, sternly. Dean has him chained like a dog in a hotel room, hovering over him like a warden, risking the apocalypse over some crazy, backwards idea that this is a cheap drug addiction and not the answer to saving the world. He steels himself against the soft feeling, against the memory of Dean’s hand on his head in the night, against the aching, nameless want for Dean that’s lived inside him for as long as he can remember.

“There are bigger things than us,” he repeats to himself, under his breath, but Dean hears—or hears enough to come collect him. 

Dean leads him back to the bed, doesn’t let Sam talk him into chaining him to the couch or the table instead. The threat of withholding the blood until Sam’s hallucinating again is enough to make the argument die on Sam’s lips, and though he glares daggers, he obediently lies back down on the bed where Dean gestures. The cuffs are looped through Sam’s belt, he sees now, which is buckled around the bedframe somehow. Sam is reluctantly impressed; he’s sure he can’t tear through leather. He makes a mental note to see if he can get a hold of it and work the buckle around to somewhere he can reach, maybe whenever Dean breaks down for a shit or shower. For now he lies on his back with his fingers laced over his head and his ankles crossed, trying to be something like comfortable and still as the urge to fidget begins.

He’s not a junkie—he’s _not_ —but he’ll reluctantly admit that the longer he’s been drinking the blood, and the more of it he’s had, the harder and faster the fall comes.

Sam doesn’t want to be the one to bring it up first; if he can play at calm until Dean offers him the next hit, it will look better, and he knows it. But the minutes drag out slow, slow enough that he begins to hear his watch ticking and it grates at his nerves.

“Pretty boring, just lying here,” he says, desperate for distraction but hoping not to sound it.

“Should have thought of that before turning into a junkie,” Dean says perfunctorily, turning a page in a newspaper, and it’s so dismissive and useless that Sam snaps before he’s even processed it fully.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” he shouts, twisting around violently to try to level a glare on his brother, needing to see him, to show him how disgusting that degree of pettiness is with his face and his voice. “Are you even—do you even _hear_ yourself?” he yells, and he can hear himself, now, wishes he hadn’t said anything, tries to bite his tongue to stop himself saying any more, but the injustice is so hurtful that he feels like a teenager all over again, stifling under yet another fucked up Winchester regime. He keeps his lips pressed shut but the sound comes anyway, an angry grunt, and he yanks hard at the cuffs. It’s fruitless and stupid but the sharp pain it jolts through his wrists is almost satisfying.

A childish, hurting part of him hopes it bruises and badly, wants Dean to see the bruises and suffer for his part in them.

Dean sets the paper down and rounds a glare on him. “Oh, yeah, not an addict at all,” he says, dripping sarcasm, and Sam lets out an animal sound, thrashes so hard the bed creaks and the nightstand scrapes on the floor.

“I’ll fucking kill you, you self-righteous prick,” Sam says, and it doesn’t even feel like it’s coming out of his own mouth, feels like it’s bypassing his brain and tongue completely and coming directly from a pit inside of his gut.

“Quiet down, Sam,” Dean says, and the tension in his voice betrays a note of worry.

They’re not out in the middle of a junkyard, now. Sure, the walls are thicker and the neighbors fewer in the honeymoon suite than in a cheap roadside motel, but if he screamed, now, someone would hear him, someone would call the police, someone would come let him free—

There’s a second of noise, no more, before Dean’s hands have closed around his throat again, choking off the sound while Dean frantically feels around for something to gag him with. Sam bucks, on the verge of panic—this is happening too often, so often he’s starting to doubt his senses, starting to fear it’s another hallucination because however much Dean hates him right now he wouldn’t strangle Sam like this, not this many times—but then the cloth napkin from breakfast is being jammed between his teeth, stuffing his mouth full and muffling the sound that tries to escape when Dean, panting, releases his neck.

Sam thrashes once more, but it’s weak, and he feels tears leaking from the corners of his eyes as he gasps for air through his nose. Dean is shaking visibly above him, one hand lying flat over Sam’s mouth in warning not to spit out the napkin.

For almost a minute, they both only stare at one another and breathe.

Dean breaks the impasse by lurching up from the bed and digging in his duffle. Sam hears the duct tape—there’s no other sound like that—and starts to dislodge the napkin with his tongue but Dean has it stuffed back inside and taped down hard in moments.

“Happy?” Dean asks, and Sam can tell he’s spitting mad, but Sam is, too, so he growls into the gag and tries to aim a knee somewhere sensitive. Dean grunts, but Sam’s pretty sure he just connected with a thigh and levels the dirtiest look on Dean that he can conjure, as full of accusation and betrayal as he can make it.

“You’ll thank me for this someday,” Dean insists, still winded from the fight, and Sam knows the demon blood must be for all intents and purposes gone from his veins, because otherwise Dean would be choking on his own tongue for that one, boiling in his own fluids. 

“Yeah, yeah,” Dean mutters, as though he can hear every bit of the vitriol Sam is thinking, and he scrubs at his face, looking haggard. He pats Sam on the chest and limps out of sight.

Sam hears the familiar scrape of a cap unscrewing, the drag of glass, and knows Dean is drinking, even though it can’t even be noon yet. It makes him somehow madder—the gall that Dean thinks _Sam_ is the one with the problem, is the one being irresponsible—but there’s nothing to do with all the rage. He indulges in a little more thrashing, yelling muffled into the cloth in his mouth, but only succeeds in tiring himself out, burning up precious energy and making himself half-nauseous in the process. The corner of the napkin tickling the back of his tongue isn’t helping, threatening to trigger his gag reflex.

The righteous anger and the will to murder Dean persist for a full twenty minutes.

After that, something that feels unpleasantly like despair and self-loathing starts to bleed in through the edges.

Sam feels _weak._

Lying chained to a bed with his mouth taped shut, Sam feels like an idiot, feels like he lost control of himself, wasted a precious opportunity with his outburst. Now the chance he’ll get any blood before he really starts to hurt has dwindled significantly, along with the chance he gets let up again for anything at all. It feels pathetic and childish, but he wants to cry, wishes his mouth was free so he could apologize and try to backpedal, wishes Dean were at least nearby so Sam didn’t feel trapped alone with this stupid feeling.

By the time an hour has passed and he’s started to sweat, fingers trembling and throat sore with bile, he can barely imagine having not wanted Dean beside him, last night, can think of little but that tender feeling he’d gotten when Dean had stroked his hair. He remembers everything that is in store for him if Dean lets him go too long, the grief and pain and abuse.

 _I’m sorry,_ he tries through the gag, but it sounds like nothing, like a mumble. His body has begun to hurt all over, and a muscle spasms at random somewhere in his leg, and another in his cheek, and he moans.

 _I’m sorry, Dean,_ he thinks, but the only response is the bottle scraping across the table while Dean pours himself another shot.

• • •

Sam is convulsing violently and leaking fat, silent tears by the time Dean finally comes back into view. He doesn’t know how long it has been, hours at most but it feels like days, and Dean is such a welcome sight that Sam moans his gratitude, tries to swear he’ll be good but can’t get the words through the gag, doesn’t honestly think he could stop his teeth chattering long enough to say so even without it.

“Shit, Sam,” Dean says, and he’s blurry, but he sounds drunk and he sounds wrecked. “If I… if I take that gag out to give you some, you gotta be quiet for me, okay?”

Sam nods, desperate, ready to agree to anything, and Dean ducks out of view for the jug.

“Just enough to knock down the DT’s,” he warns, though neither of them can really know how much that is. Sam nods anyway, tries to brace himself still so Dean can get the tape off. He pulls it too slow, and it hurts more than it has to, but his fingers seem clumsy more than sadistic and Sam doesn’t have it in him to care. He gags on the napkin and starts to choke, and Dean curses, pulling it out fast, muttering apologies and shushing him, petting his damp hair off of his forehead. “Jesus, Sam,” he says, like his heart is broken, “please don’t make me do that again,” and Sam promises he won’t, or tries to, but his tongue is dry and fat and his throat too sore to cooperate. He nods, instead, and Dean pats him, weak, uncaps the jug.

Sam arches, open-mouthed, but he’s trembling too much for Dean to aim, and Dean puts a hand on his chest to press him flat. Sam lets him, but opens his mouth wider, begging with his eyes, and the lukewarm trickle down his tongue makes him groan, makes his eyelids twitch shut in bliss. He is too full of need to hide it, to stop the way his hips come off the bed, to be in control of anything but forcing his mouth to stay open for the stream of mana, to not let it close when he swallows, to not miss a drop.

“You’re sick,” Dean whispers as he stops, in something like disturbed awe, but Sam can’t care right now, can’t do anything but try to suck every drop down his throat, lick his lips hungrily and wait for the blood to kick in and soothe his trembling.

Sam sucks shaking breaths through his mouth, lies quiet and limp. Dean walks away—Sam doesn’t know where—but Sam stays still, too grateful to risk anything. Water runs in the bathroom for a minute, and then Dean is back with a damp washcloth, cleaning the snot from under his nose and the tears from the corners of his eyes, and what must be traces of blood from the corners of his mouth. Sam blinks his eyes open then, full of naked gratitude, and hoarsely manages to say, “Thank you,” but Dean is staring down at him like he's frightened, and it feels like a shock of cold water.

He can feel the erection tenting his jeans, and Dean’s eyes have fixed on it. Sam starts to panic, tries to shift a knee to disguise it, pleads, “Dean…” but can’t think of any way to explain it, and anyway, Dean is backing away and out of sight, and doesn’t say a thing.

• • •

It’s almost dark in the room and Dean hasn’t turned on any of the lights. It worries Sam almost as much as the pervasive silence. Almost.

In retrospect Sam is glad Dean ignored him when he pleaded for water and food mid-afternoon, because he doubts Dean would have brought him the bucket afterwards. Sam only knows Dean is still there at all because every so often he hears the bottle scrape along the table, or a creak from the chair. When the room gets really dim, there is finally a little unsteady clacking, and a wavering glow from the laptop casts light and shadows on the ceiling. Though that could be the hallucinations starting again. Sam can’t really be sure, anymore.

It occurs to him that it’s strange that he can tell for certain when he’s not hallucinating, but not for sure when he is. As soon as he has that thought, though, he doubts it; the part of his brain that moves a mile a minute tells him it’s a logical impossibility, that the statement contains its own contradiction inside itself somehow, but there is a blurriness between him and that part, static in the connection. The gnawing in his veins is making him fuzzy in a way he hates, a way that makes him feel frightened and weak, because it slows down the fastest part of him, the strongest part of him, the part he has always been able to rely on unquestionably.

“Dean,” he pleads finally, soft, “Dean, I need it…”

He will not allow pride and strategy to fuck him over, this time. He knows he is close to his limit.

“Please,” he adds, in so helpless a tone it makes him feel a little nauseous. 

He has been trembling for a while now (he doesn’t know how long), but he knows better than to struggle. Until he can’t, he will lie still, will be good, because the alternative is worse. 

He tries to tell himself this isn’t surrender but survival, and it mostly works.

Dean isn’t responding, but there is a wet noise, organic and familiar but hard to place, and a shuffling, so Sam thinks Dean is near enough to hear him. Sam’s mouth is open already, sticky with disuse and hungry to nurse.

Sam listens to the ticking of his watch, counts out five minutes as they pass, ten.

“Dean,” he begs, because the sounds have changed and become surreal and terrible. The squelching reminds him of the time a hunter they were staying with in Missouri field-dressed a deer in front of them, like it was an exercise in character-building, and Sam, barely eleven, threw up on his shoes while Dean only said, “Gross,” but was too pale for an hour afterward. Sam becomes certain the shadows contain antlers, now, and hunting knives, and worse, so much worse.

The chair tips, clatters, and the sound of the laptop snapping shut cuts through the wetness, dispelling it into nothing with just a faint click. Dean is coming for him, and Sam’s eyes sink shut in agony and ecstasy.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he is mumbling, before Dean has even arrived, and his body doesn’t feel under his control, anymore, twisting and arcing and squirming without his direction. He needs, needs down deep, and the nearness of satisfaction is too much.

The thud of glass is jarring and his eyes snap open on Dean, who is only barely succeeding in setting down the liquor bottle on the nightstand without it tipping. His eyes are ringed in red and glassy, his mouth is soft and slack, and he is drunk, so drunk that Sam would be pissed if he weren’t so desperate, but still too beautiful to stand. Sam hates to see it.

Dean’s face is hard to read, through the thick blanket of inebriation, but Sam wonders if Dean is feeling something similar.

“You want it,” Dean slurs. It is not a question, but Sam nods anyway, licks his lips before opening his mouth again. “Feels good,” Dean adds, cheap accusation, but Sam doesn’t try to deny it. His body would put the lie to it soon enough.

Dean scowls, stumbles when he turns to pick up the jug, but rights himself before he can go over.

Sam bites down hard on an accusation of his own. _Eyes on the prize,_ he thinks, clings to it.

The jug thuds down on the nightstand, too close to the bottle, and Dean scrambles to catch the liquor before it can fall. It’s almost empty as it is. “Why can’t you just fucking drink like everybody else?” Dean asks, facing Sam with the bottle in hand. “You want a drink, Sam?”

Sam doesn’t answer, a seasick feeling down in his stomach. He doesn’t know what the right answer is.

“Sure you do,” Dean answers for him, and grips Sam's jaw roughly in his left hand to hold his mouth open before tipping the bottle over him. It is childish and petty, and Sam wants to duck away while it splashes, starts to try, but he’s so thirsty… He squeezes his eyes shut against the bounce of droplets and holds still. It glugs down too fast and he chokes on it, coughs until some of it comes out of his nose, but he gets a few precious mouthfuls anyway.

“Shit,” Dean mutters, abandons the bottle somewhere and peers close. “Y’okay?”

 _That’s nice,_ Sam thinks, _fine with chaining and humiliating me, but not with choking me to death. Good to know._ But what he says is, “Yeah,” keeps coughing to clear his throat. His eyes are watering enough that he’s temporarily blind, but he can breathe and swallow again soon enough.

“Booze is better,” Dean says, in spite of the evidence to the contrary, and Sam closes his eyes rather than risk rolling them.

“Still need the blood, Dean,” he says, as evenly as he can, but his voice is shaking.

“Hate that you like it,” Dean says, sullen as a child, and Sam keeps his eyes closed, tightens his jaw against a retort, until the pop of the jug startles eyes and mouth open. “Shouldn’t like it,” Dean says, “should hate her just like the others,” and Sam thinks he hears jealousy through the petulance.

“She’s trying to help,” he says, weakly, and knows at once that was the wrong thing to say. Dean’s eyes flash ugly.

“What do you think I’m try’na do? Can’t tell someone’s try’na help you ‘less they fuck you up while they’re at it?” he asks, and then his hand is in Sam’s hair, pulling hard again. “That help, Sam?”

Sam cringes, feels the pinch where the superglue is rough on the edges and hopes the liquid ‘stitches’ don’t pop.

“Maybe just feels too good when you drink it, huh?” Dean asks, voice thin, breathless with—something. It almost sounds like excitement. “Maybe ‘f it hurt as much to drink it as to not, maybe…”

He trails off, but his hand isn’t loosening, twists up until Sam croaks, “Dean—" and Dean shoves his head away, hard.

Sam sucks air, blinking his eyes rapidly to clear them.

 _This is wrong,_ he thinks, fleetingly, a trickle of panic setting in, _this is going wrong, wrong…._

Dean is disheveled, he sees now, shirt rumpled, jeans undone, and suddenly the detail is lurid. _Maybe this isn’t real,_ he thinks, frantic. “Dean,” he says, urgent, “I’m—I’m starting to hallucinate, please—please give me some—“

Dean is muttering, grabbing the jug, but he sounds under water, echoey. Sam makes out “give it to you” but nothing else. 

Dean knees up onto the bed with him, and as real as his weight had felt in the panic room, the way the bed lurches, now, rolling Sam over against Dean’s leg, against the half-hard lump of Dean's cock, is realer by an order of magnitude. Sam’s resolution not to jerk at the chains is waning, and he pulls at the cuffs like an anchor.

“Tell me you want it,” Dean slurs, and Sam feels queasy. He doesn’t think Dean means the blood. The hand digging against him, pulling at the fly of his jeans, seems to confirm that, and Sam starts to scramble, tries to reach the belt, tries to crawl away from the tether at his ankles.

“Dean,” Sam begs, when he gets no leverage, “Dean, please, stop—please, just—“

His stomach turns a somersault when the seat of his pants and his shorts are yanked down under his ass, and the scrape of the fabric, the strange greasiness to Dean’s hand where it’s shoving at him (jacking off at the laptop, Sam registers dimly, that was the sound, Dean’s still covered in lotion or lube or—) are too solid. And it is impossible, can't be happening, but he knows this is real, knows for certain this is not a hallucination, knows it like he knows what air feels like, or water.

“Dean—“ he pleads, but then he’s jerked over onto his belly, and Dean’s body is heavy on his back where it collapses on top of him, pressing his air out.

 _It wasn't real,_ he thinks again, panic surging.

“Sick,” Dean is hissing against his hair, “want it so bad,” and Sam does thrash now, but Dean is like lead on him, pinning his legs in the tangle of his jeans, one forearm jamming down against the back of his neck, and it feels like every time Sam tries to kick or wrench, Dean’s cock gets harder against his leg, more eager with every breath of resistance. Sam twists his face aside so he can breathe, gasps for air, and his mouth is inches from the jug of blood, its handle still gripped loose in Dean’s other hand.

“Can have it,” Dean rambles, nosing wildly in Sam’s hair, and the feverish intimacy of the warm breath on Sam’s scalp and Dean’s lips soft on his ear is a strange juxtaposition to the violence of Dean’s pin, sends goosebumps up and down his body. “Can have it but ’s gonna hurt,” Dean grunts as he shifts on Sam’s back, bracing the jug against Sam’s shoulder so a hand is loose to crawl between them, and Dean’s oily erection is suddenly jutting up hard under Sam’s balls, dragging up his perineum until Dean’s fist guides it against his asshole.

Sam freezes. 

There is one long drip of blood half-dried on the side of the jug, and Sam stares at it, wonders insanely if he could get his mouth on it, while the head of Dean’s cock fails to breach, at first, distorts Sam’s body instead. Dean growls, frustrated, and bears his hips down, and when the head jumps through the ungiving ring, all Sam can think is there should be a ridiculous sound to accompany it, like a cork popping, but he can’t hear it if there is. Even slick with whatever Dean had smeared on himself, the slide of Dean’s cock in and in burns like sandpaper, feels larger than it can possibly really be, and Sam’s air strangles out of him when it feels like he’s being split apart, like he is made entirely of seams with the stitches about to give.

Dean keeps pushing until there is nowhere else to go, until he is flat and flush along Sam’s spine. Sam throbs with pain, in time with his pulse, and he can see the red glow of it swelling and ebbing in the dark like a heartbeat.

For a moment the room is almost silent, like neither of them has remembered how to breathe. Sam thinks Dean is melting into his skin, feels something vague and soft and warm sliding down his sides, like the edges between their bodies are losing meaning. Sam thinks of honey, of chocolate, of wax, of all the things that blur together into one mass when the pieces melt too close to one another.

But maybe he and Dean have always been that. Every separation breaks their edges anew, a piece gained here, another lost there. Dean is melting into him like tar, and when he throws Sam away part of Sam will be left behind.

Sam’s eyes and throat burn. He hears the blood boiling in the jug.

Dean jerks once and Sam is sure something comes apart inside, a new seam breaking open, but at least the weight is off of his neck. Dean’s arm comes around under his forehead instead, and Sam thinks he’s about to be put in a headlock, but Dean stops there, wrenching Sam’s head back at a painful angle. Now that his cock is inside of Sam, Dean’s hand is free for the jug, and Sam is almost surprised when it begins to tip toward him, begins to drizzle the blood (which does not burn and blister his skin after all) messily down, painting his cheek and his nose and his chin before it lands on Sam’s desperate tongue.

He’d almost thought that Dean had forgotten. Or that he was going to leave the jug there on purpose, close enough to smell but not taste, and never give it to him, even while Sam came apart, burned, wasted away into nothing beneath him.

Sam laps at the stream, tries to crane to catch more of it, to lose less to the bed and to his own hair, and the pain that was his entire body begins slowly to dim, begins to pull back by inches until it is only in the places it belongs—in his scalp, in his ass, inside the cuffs and between his shoulders. It stops receding too soon, cuts off with a slosh while Dean uses his cock like a weapon, stabbing punctuation onto the end of the relief, and Sam creaks out a cry.

Dean lets go of his head, and Sam collapses relieved onto the mattress. There is blood in the bedspread, and Sam tries to close his mouth over the damp patch, tries to suck it in between his teeth, too precious to waste, no matter what else is happening to his body.

Dean sounds like he is gagging, but it doesn’t soften his cock inside of Sam or stop the slow drive of it into Sam's body.

There is a sawing pain to it that won't recede and a feeling like he's going to be pulled apart every time Dean draws back, but underneath the sick-sweet reek of brown liquor, Sam can smell Dean, can smell the warm and familiar of him and his sweat. He can feel the effervescent tingling in his veins from the hit of blood, taste the salt-metal taste he’s half-convinced now is sweet instead of sour after how many times he’s sucked it down while burying his cock inside something hot and wet, and even through the pain his cock gets the message, swelling uncomfortably against the mattress. The heel of Dean’s palm flattens on Sam’s cheek, mashing him into the stain, but it slips in some of the blood that had landed on his skin, so Sam tries to lick it anyway. 

Maybe he is as wrong as Dean says he is.

Dean grinds down into him, and Sam feels his eyes brimming, closes them like that would negate the tear slipping from the inside corner and down over the bridge of his nose. Then tries to focus on the pain instead like that would negate the heat in his groin, the hungry way he’s still trying to lap blood from his brother’s palm. The guilt swells like sickness but the want does, too.

He tongues, all longing and grief, at Dean’s skin, and Dean lets out a groan.

“Fucked up, Sammy,” he breathes, but it sounds hungry, and he lets up off of Sam’s face and sticks his fingers into the mouth of the jug, coating them with the blood still dripping back down the inside of the plastic. He almost tips the jug trying to pull his hand free, and Sam is sure his heart stops for a moment, but the jug steadies, and then Dean’s wet fingers are at his lips. Dean shoves them roughly inside of his mouth, and Sam wants to bite them, almost manages to make himself do it, but the taste is too much and he sucks on them instead, closing his lips around them and swirling his tongue over every surface he can reach.

Dean uses his fingers in Sam’s mouth for leverage, pulling at him like a bridle to drive in deeper, and Sam’s jaw is forced open wide against the bed while Dean pierces deep inside of him from both ends. The fleeting thought that Dean could probably have coated his dick in the demon blood to the same effect almost makes Sam laugh, horrified, and makes his cock jerk angry and weeping against he bedspread. 

Dean is punching guttural sounds out of Sam’s body on every thrust, and he tries to swallow them, but with his mouth held wide they echo too loud in his ears. Dean’s other hand clutches blindly at Sam’s shoulder, at the side of his neck, but not strangling him this time; his fingers are groping and clutching like Sam is a buoy in an ocean and he will drown if he loses hold.

Sam struggles again, unable to not, but he’s still disoriented and too afraid of upending the jug to put any force in it. Heat is growing in his groin and he’ll never live down the shame if he comes on Dean’s cock like this, but he doesn’t know if the alternative is any better.

The choice evaporates when Dean lets out a sound more pain than relief and slowly stutters to a halt. Sam honestly can’t tell if Dean came or just cramped or is losing his erection to the whiskey; it seems impossible to Sam that he shouldn’t be able to tell for sure, though he felt the same about the hallucinations. He tells himself to just be grateful it’s ending. 

His guts are full of pain too sharp and jagged to tell him much. Dean is softening. 

Dean is panting hot against Sam’s hair, his chest sliding against Sam’s back in their combined sweat. Sam’s body feels too warm all over, stifled, and the rapidly cooling sweat is soothing.

Dean shifts a little, tipping them almost onto their sides, and his breath goes soft almost at once, shallow with sleep. His fingers slip out of Sam's mouth, but his arm stays wrapped around Sam's body tight.

• • •

Sam doesn’t sleep.

He tries not to think, either, and half the time he is strangely, blissfully able, drowning the rattle of consciousness under the dream-hazy glow of the withdrawals receding, and the hypnotic activity of nursing blood out of the bedspread. He worked a little of the fabric up between his teeth, just enough to get his tongue against it and close his lips around it, and his saliva seeps out into it, sucks just a little of the blood up and into his mouth along with it as he draws back in. It is rhythmic and slow and easy, and he wonders if this is why infants fall asleep at the breast.

He wishes he could sleep.

He knows soon enough that Dean did come inside of him, because his cock slips out of Sam, soft, on an ooze of cum (and, Sam prays, nothing else, but can’t imagine there isn’t blood, there _must_ be blood, and God he wants to wash it away). The glass-shard feeling every time he spasms inside is fading, though, the demon blood knitting him together just a little too fast. Sam almost wishes it wouldn’t, this time; it is too precious, too fleeting, to burn out on something as small as this.

Dean wakes briefly in the night, long enough to climb off and set the jug aside (Sam breathes easier when it’s capped on the floor) and stagger to the bathroom, but passes out across the bed as soon as he comes back, one calf thrown over Sam’s back like Sam is an ottoman and not a person.

At least his skin is cooler without Dean melded up against him like a second skin; at least he can breathe easier without the weight.

Part of him misses it, too, though. He jaws more forcefully into the fabric, now that the jug isn’t at risk, works more intently at the traces of blood there rather than let himself dwell on that fucked up little fact. He tries to work the belt around, too, but he can't get it to budge, suspects the buckle is tilted flat over some too-narrow space.

By the time light breaks in soft with dawn, the rust tinge in the bedspread is barely visible. Sam’s mouth tastes sour, the polyester as metallic as the blood somehow, but it has slowed down the withdrawals so it’s a trade he would make a hundred times. 

Sam’s eyes are sore and dry, aching with having been open too much of the night. When Dean finally rouses, Sam closes them, tries to pretend to sleep rather than face him, tucking his face under his bicep. Dean seems to feel the same; he checks that the belt is still buckled to the bed securely and then slinks away to the bathroom for a shower so long that Sam hates him a little, sullen with jealousy.

Wonders why he doesn’t hate him more.

Sam prods guiltily at that thought like he'd prod a loose tooth with his tongue—unable to leave it alone, pushing for pain and not careful enough of the sharp edges. Two times in as many days he was ready to murder his brother, too full of rage to cope with the judgment in Dean's face, with the sense of being thrown away, and Sam thinks he should be feeling more murderous, now, not less. He thinks he shouldn't have this soft, sore feeling inside of him, or this strange swell of shame. Shouldn't be thinking of the way Dean's breath felt on his neck, last night, of how tightly he held onto Sam while he fucked him, like he wanted to keep him close and never let go, rather than lock him up alone in a some kind of dungeon, some _oubliette_ —a place of forgetting.

For all the ugliness in Dean right now, for all the brutality, some part of Sam is surer now that Dean still loves him than he was before. And the rest of Sam wonders how broken he must be, how fucked up and perverted, that this looks like love to him.

• • •

Sam must actually fall asleep, because the hot washcloth swiping between his legs startles him awake so badly he thrashes. If he weren’t chained, if Dean weren’t straddling one of his legs, he’s certain he’d have propelled himself clear onto the floor with that one.

Dean shushes him like he’s a spooked animal, plants one hand in the small of his back. “Sammy,” he says, voice raw and low, and Sam falls still. He wishes again that he knew why.

He also wishes he knew why his voice cracks when he asks, “Actually, can I… can I have a bath?”

The washcloth stills between his cheeks, and Dean clears his throat. “Uh. Yeah." Guilt is thick in Dean's voice, sounds like it's threatening to choke him, and Sam's stomach clenches. "Yeah," Dean repeats. "You promise to behave,” he adds as a condition, and Sam nods, tries not to worry that the thought of escape during transfer hadn’t occurred to him before Dean mentioned it, this time.

He chalks it up to the stress and disorientation and just how badly he needs to feel clean.

Dean frees the handcuffs from the belt, and Sam lies obediently while the ankle chain is untethered. He decides against any sudden motions, waits for Dean to help him to his unsteady feet. His pants and shorts are still around his knees.

“You’re going to have to—“ he begins, but Dean waves him down, is already at work on the logistics, looking washed out and red-eyed between the cuffs, and not up at Sam's face, never up at Sam's face. He looks ill in a way Sam thinks is unrelated to the hangover.

After a long moment, Dean mumbles, “All right, into the bathroom,” gestures Sam on ahead, and Sam doesn’t know what to do except go, and hope Dean has it figured out.

He feels small, somehow. Smaller than he did the day before. He’s pretty sure he’s glad Dean doesn’t seem any more interested in making eye contact than Sam is.

Dean lets him use the toilet more or less unwatched while he kneels and fiddles with the taps on the oversized tub, and Sam tries not to look too long at the tissue when he’s done. There is somehow more blood and less than he was expecting. He wonders how much left with the washcloth, but decides against looking too closely at it where Dean left it in the sink. He waits, tries to figure out how to take up all the space in his body again, curling and uncurling his fists, stretching onto his toes and rocking onto his heels to fend off the cramps trying to start in his calves. He doesn’t like the watery feeling in his head when he does it, wonders if it’s from spending too long horizontal, too long without food, too long without blood.

He waits for his balance to recover and for just a moment imagines buttoning up his jeans, shoving Dean as hard as he can from behind over the tub, and running, running and not stopping. Part of him is satisfied at the vision it produces—Dean’s skull cracking on the tile before he falls forward into the water, slips under. But however badly he wanted to strangle his brother the day before, the thought of Dean drowning alone in a hotel bathtub makes him feel sicker than the thought of doing nothing at all does. He cups his palm in the sink under the tap, instead, sucks water desperately and tries to wash the bile back down. 

When the tub is full, Dean turns off the taps and leaves Sam standing there uncertain for a few moments while he disappears into the suite. He comes back with his gun in his right hand, and two small keys in his left. He blocks the door with his body.

“Come on,” Sam says, disbelieving, though part of his brain tries to shout him down, warns that baiting his brother right now is one of the stupidest decisions he could make. “You’re not honestly going to shoot me,” he says anyway.

They both knew too well the rule that you should never point a gun at someone if you weren’t willing to follow through.

“Not if you keep your head and don’t do anything stupid,” Dean says, and his tone is so flattened and tired that suddenly Sam believes, believes completely that maybe Dean wouldn’t shoot to kill, but Sam could take a bullet in the shoulder or the leg without Dean thinking twice. 

Sam raises his palms in surrender and waits.

Dean knows better than to get too close; Sam’s arms are longer, and even chained, Sam might have a good chance at disarming him. So he tosses the keys to Sam’s feet and steps back, keeping the gun trained on him.

Sam was right: he’s pretty sure Dean has put his left kneecap in his sights. Even hungover, Sam doesn’t trust Dean will miss. 

There is something strangely comforting in the gun trained on him; the responsibility to get loose is temporarily removed, because the responsibility to survive is greater, and the tension that had been ratcheting up between his shoulder blades since he thought of escape starts to uncoil. He moves slowly and keeps his hands well visible, unlocking his wrists and ankles and trying not to groan his relief too loudly when he rubs the grooves they’ve left in his skin.

“Kick the keys and cuffs over here,” Dean says, curt, like he’s a cop, or a robber in a holdup. Sam does, and starts to undress, turning half away like that will protect some modicum of his dignity.

It won’t. He still can’t not.

When he’s deep in the water, eyes slipping shut in relief—it’s hot, a little too hot which is just right—there is a clink, and he opens his eyes to see the handcuffs over the edge of the tub, Dean already withdrawn back to a safe distance. The ankle cuffs and keys are gone from the floor.

“One hand cuffed to the bar,” Dean says, gesturing with the barrel to the steel balance bar mounted along the back wall.

“Seriously?” Sam says again, but nothing has changed in Dean’s demeanor, so Sam does what he’s told. He’s been shot at over less.

When Sam is cuffed to the bar, Dean’s posture goes slack, relief going through him so visibly it makes him tremble.

Sam stares.

Dean looks haggard and haunted, ten years older overnight, and Sam steels himself against sympathy.

“Wash up,” Dean says finally, still looking at somewhere around Sam's knees instead of his face, stuffing the gun in his waistband. "Gonna go order us some grub.” Sam is starved, so he mumbles assent and awkwardly begins to wash one-handed. 

Dean stays out in the suite while Sam bathes, and Sam is reluctantly grateful to him for the privacy. He doesn’t even try to wash his hair, but he can’t seem to stop scrubbing at his body, tries not to think too much about what he’s trying to wash away. At length he manages to turn his eyes out onto the bathroom, dutifully cataloging anything that might serve as a lockpick that he’d be able to secret away in his mouth, or a weapon, but it feels distant, somehow, like something he only remembers he should want to be doing. Little is promising, but he eyes the showerhead above. 

Sam tests his freedom against Dean’s ears, carefully standing to pull the wand from its cradle—it’s one of those detachable ones, and he has to strongly weigh the options between using it for its intended purpose first to clear the soap from between his legs and taking it apart to see if there is something small and metal inside that he can shake free. 

In the end, he decides that he doesn’t want to be caught at it, and he can’t actually be certain the wand will stay usable once he’s done if he takes something out, so he pins it between his cheek and his shoulder to free his unchained hand to turn on the tap. Dean’s reflection turns up briefly in the mirror, tense, and Sam pretends not to see, uses the wand to rinse foam and filth from his body unhurriedly until Dean drifts back out of sight.

Sam turns off the tap and sinks quietly back under the surface with the wand.

It is awkward with one hand, but he manages to twist the wand apart from the tubing with minimal splashing. The spring he hoped for is nowhere to be seen, and everything else is plastic or rubber: a washer, a filter, little else. The disappointment is dull, at the same remove somehow as the effort itself. Sam screws it back together under the water as quietly as he can, craning his neck to check the mirror again, but Dean is still nowhere to be seen. He finds the faceplate will not come off without a special tool—not and still pass muster—and he lets that flimsy hope slip away, too.

Maybe if he had time, if he weren’t tethered, if not killing Dean weren’t preferable… 

Sam sighs and clambers reluctantly back up to his feet. He still aches in too many places to want to give up soaking, but the water is lukewarm and murky, now, so he unstops the drain with his toes, puts the wand back on the cradle, and turns on the taps hot, letting the water bore into his skin, turn his body pink with heat. He ducks to stick his head under, even if he can’t wash his hair properly, just to feel the warmth in his scalp, the soothing blindness of water sluicing over his closed eyes and mouth.

When he finally smacks the tap off, a towel is wrapped around his shoulders before the showerhead has even stopped dripping. He almost falls, again, jerking away and against the wall.

“Shit,” he gasps, catches his breath. “Damnit, Dean, stop sneaking up on me.”

Dean is wiping a weak smile away under his hand, and Sam glares but doesn’t mean it, until he remembers again that he should and his stomach drops. After that, he doesn’t keep glaring.

“Thanks,” he says, to the tile wall, instead, and awkwardly starts drying himself with the towel. Dean backs up to sit against the counter, waits.

“This would be a lot easier with both hands,” Sam tries, eventually, and Dean seems to weigh that, lets his eyes wander while he plots logistics again before settling in the tub. One hand is fishing in his pocket, the other into his waistband, but he freezes there, squints at Sam’s feet.

Sam slows his drying, tries to glance down without getting caught at it.

The pink rubber washer from inside the shower wand is sitting against the drain, half hidden by foam, but not hidden enough. In the space of a breath, Sam considers whether he has any chance of hiding it with his foot or with a sweep of more foam toward the drain, of convincing Dean it’s a trick of the eye, of fighting his way out with his wrist still cuffed to the wall. He considers what Dean might do in response to seeing it, whether he’ll assume correctly that Sam took advantage of being left alone and tried to find a tool, or give him the benefit of the doubt, think that it might have been there before Sam got in and just passed unnoticed. But with the way Dean managed to hunt Sam down through every false trail and unlikely maneuver, Sam doubts Dean will imagine anything but the truth. He tries to give nothing away, just in case, but Dean’s expression is shuttering, darkening. His hands come away from the keys and the gun, arms folding over his chest like a shield.

Sam swallows, waits.

“And you wonder why I don’t trust you,” Dean says, finally, so heavy with disappointment that it manages to hurt, even under the bizarre circumstances.

Sam starts to protest, almost says “Dean, please,” almost says “You’re one to talk,” almost says “I’m sorry,” almost says a hundred things, but Dean holds up a hand to stop him and walks out of the bathroom.

“Dean…” Sam sighs, but he rubs the towel over his body more quickly, half afraid he’ll lose the chance to get dry somehow if he doesn’t do it quickly. But Dean doesn’t respond, doesn’t come back to the door, isn’t visible from the mirror. 

“Dean?” he calls, uneasy. He has to grip the bar and stretch his arm out full length to climb out of the tub and onto the damp bath mat, but even when he lets go for a few more inches of chain, the luxury tub is too big across and the bar set too low for him to stretch across and still stand up straight from outside of it. Sam towels off his feet, his calves, his balls, and tries to pretend Dean will be back by the time he is dry. He keeps going, pushing away at the dampness like it will take the sinking feeling away with it when it is gone, but when only his hair is left wet and he’s getting stiff from standing bent in a jackknife over the tub, he thinks he’s wrong.

He braces on the bar and lays the towel over the side of the tub, tries to straddle it before the pain shoots through his tail, propels him back to his feet with a sharp sound. He tries to stifle it and doesn’t know why. Maybe if Dean heard he was in pain, he’d come back.

Though it didn’t work in the panic room. And when he started to scream here, he didn’t like the fallout.

At a loss for what else to do, and not sure why it hurts his heart to do it, Sam pushes his towel into the tub basin, scrabbles out at full reach until he has the mat and another towel besides to kick out almost flat on top of it. Even with three layers, his ass aches sitting on the porcelain, and he shifts around onto one hip. He stays there until he can’t, then goes onto his knees. He stays there until he can’t, too.

Dean shoves a tray of food inside the door when Sam suspects about an hour has passed. Sam can’t reach it without going through the process all over, stretched to capacity to climb outside. He drags it closer with a foot until he can move the contents inside the tub and at least eat sitting rather than bent in half over the edge. If Dean knows how difficult something this simple is from here, he doesn’t care. If he doesn’t know—Sam hasn’t seen him look in—Sam suspects he still wouldn’t care if Sam tried to tell him.

For a moment, Sam doesn’t care, either. He hasn’t eaten since the morning before. It’s a rough guess at best, but he thinks it’s pushing on thirty hours, and he’s halfway through a cold sandwich before he reminds himself to slow down if he doesn’t want to be sick, reminds himself to chew, wonders if there’s any hope of not being sick anyway if Dean’s not going to bring any blood. He checks inside the sandwich for any sign it’s been sprinkled with some, but it feels like wishful thinking even as he does. The inside is nothing but meat and lettuce and mayonnaise, a badly spread dot of mustard. The salad is still inside a plastic clamshell, untouched, and Sam is at least grateful there’s a vegetable, but he’d take a dose of blood in its place in a heartbeat, at this point.

The food fills up his stomach, feels wadded and unpleasant there, but it doesn't clear his head. Neither does the bottle of water. He shifts hips and lays his forehead on the edge of the tub, grateful it’s cooler than his skin. He thinks he should worry that his skin feels too warm when he’s naked in a room with working forced air, but the thought is vague and distant.

“Dean,” he tries, tiredly. “It’s starting.”

He doesn’t hold out much hope that that will achieve anything, pins his free hand between his knees to try to stop it shaking.

So much for not being left in the place of forgetting.

When the hallucinations start in earnest, Sam squeezes out the washcloth and folds it, trembling, in half, then rolls it into a cylinder. He puts it between his teeth and bites down, as much to stop his teeth clacking together as to muffle the screaming he imagines will be soon on its heels.

• • •

Sam wakes up with his neck too stiff to turn and his shoulder screaming at him. His mouth is empty but tastes of blood. The world is upside-down.

It takes him a few agonizing minutes to realize he’s still in the tub, and that he’s slumped down almost onto his back, pulling hard against his tethered arm. A towel is wadded under his head and something dark is between his wrist and the cuff—he guesses a sock has been wrapped there—but it’s hard to see for sure. His wrist still hurts, but at least his skin doesn’t feel cut by the metal. The lights have been turned out, and even though it leaves him half-blind, Sam is grateful for that; the pain behind his eyes is too much to bear up against fluorescents.

Carefully, he pushes up onto his hip and then reluctantly onto his ass, fumbling the towel that had been his erstwhile pillow up behind his neck to cushion it against the wall.

Sam runs his tongue over his teeth. It’s not cut; he thinks the trace of blood in his mouth is demon and not his own. There just wasn’t enough of it. He’s barely less dizzy than he was before he passed out. At least he’s not seizing anymore. 

He closes his eyes, rubs them slowly with fingers that are still trembling just a little, brushes the sleep out of them. It’s still too much contact for the pain there, and he wonders if this is what the beginning of a migraine feels like. He tries digging his fingers into the muscles of his neck, instead, and while it hurts just as much, at least it feels productive, less like he’s going to shatter something. He tries stretching, twists his body at the waist until there is a cascade of satisfying pops up and down his spine, and he groans relief.

There are three new bottles of water on the edge of the tub against the wall, still wet with condensation, and he feels a surge of gratitude again. He tries to feel stupid about that—he shouldn’t need to be grateful for access to cold water, for his brother _deigning_ to meet a basic fucking need for someone he’s got chained up—but it’s tenuous, further away than it should be, and by the time he’s gulped down half a bottle it has evaporated into nothing, slipping out of his grasp like smoke.

Dean loves him enough to try to keep him alive, even if it’s all twisted up into something grotesque right now.

Maybe Sam’s twisted up into something grotesque right now, too. He closes his eyes and thinks of Ruby, thinks of the tenderness there, of her promise that he is not as monstrous as Dean says, but also of her soft skin bleeding under his tongue, and he has to shift to make space for his cock swelling in his lap. He licks his lips unconsciously, can almost feel Dean’s fingers between them, feeding blood onto his hungry tongue, and he wants it like breathing. Wonders if he can bargain, can beg, to make it happen again.

He calls quietly to Dean when the shaking starts, but his pride is strong enough, for now, to keep from begging to suck his brother's fingers. But he honestly doesn’t know for how much longer.

• • •

Not long, it turns out.

Sam has no way of keeping track of the time, now; Dean took Sam's dirty clothes away and his watch went with them, so his heartbeat is as close a pulse as he has to rely on, and it’s weak enough that he loses track of it, especially when he starts to drift. But it doesn't feel like long before he's sucked under a rising tide of blood that he tries to drink down before it can swallow him, Dean’s hands holding him against the bottom of the tub by the neck. Dean seems to flicker above him, rippling in the red glow reflecting off of the pool in the almost-dark.

“Sam!” breaks through the vision, sharp, and the red dissipates from around him, along with the fluid in his lungs and the weight on his chest. The towel is beneath his head again, and Dean is bent over the edge of the tub holding him down, but by the shoulder, the forehead, ducking Sam’s thrashing arms. The panic and raw pain in Sam seems to be mirrored on Dean's face.

Sam gasps, grips Dean’s arm like a lifeline. “Please,” he wheezes, “please, Dean, I’ll do anything you want, just give me some more, I’ll—you can do whatever you need to do to me, I’ll suck it off your dick,” he babbles, “I don’t care, I just—I need—“

Dean hisses and drops him like he’s made of hot iron, scrambling back on his bottom away from the tub. 

“Please!” Sam shouts, frantic, but Dean is tumbling out of the door on his knees. “Dean, please!” he begs, as the blood begins to overtake him again, and as he tries to drink it he’s sure it’s been poisoned, because his body spasms violently, bows up into a rigid arch, twisting violently through space. He is completing a circuit, the bridge between two terminals, and the blue shriek of electricity lights up the room in evil shadows.

Sam swallows the blood anyway—better to poison than drown—and then there is a weight forcing him back down to the floor of the tub, and he can taste the blood, really _taste_ it on his tongue this time, with the salt of sweating fingers beneath, solid and real, realer than the rest. He moans relief, doesn’t want to let the fingers go as they withdraw, but they come back, new coated in blood and dripping, and he sucks them clean. Twice more it happens, and when the fingers don’t withdraw again, linger there heavy in his mouth, he doesn’t stop tonguing them, trying to press gratitude into every pore while he his erection grinds helplessly up against Dean’s ass where it’s weighting him down until he becomes real enough to not float away. He mutters, “Yes,” mutters “please,” mutters “more,” but it’s garbled into nothing around the fingers, breathy nonsense full of want. Right now Sam is a creature made entirely of need.

Dean makes a sound above him, animal, full of want and grief and something darker, and the fingers are gone, leaving Sam’s tongue moving bereft on the air. There is a tumbling, Dean moving down his body, and then Sam's ass is hauled onto Dean's lap, an open zipper and denim biting into his flank. An echoing thud might be the jug shifting on the porcelain, sloshing, but Sam’s eyes won’t focus enough yet to see it for sure. Everything is dark, thick with shadow, and only his skin wants to tell him where he is, what is happening.

His skin tells him there are wet fingers pressing at his ass, smearing over the raw hole, and then something bigger, slicked with something too thin to make much difference is right behind it. But when it shoves inside of him there is electricity cutting through the pain of it, a buzzing energy lighting up all the nerves inside on contact, and he arches up from the navel.

Sam spasms once all over, kicking blindly at the walls of the tub, and Dean’s hand mashes over the side of his face to anchor him down against the floor, his other hand digging bruising hard into Sam’s hip.

There is blood inside him. Dean has pushed the blood of a demon into Sam’s body from both ends, carried on his skin, on his fingers and his cock. Sam’s eyes roll up in his head and he falls still with one leg landing slack on Dean's shoulder, while Dean pants above him, frozen.

“I don’t—" Dean begins, hoarse, sounding frayed. “I don’t want to do this to you,” he insists, but he rocks his hips into Sam’s with a desperation that puts the lie to it. His cheek is rubbing rough over Sam's knee, his breath raw and wet on the skin there. “If it’s—if it’s the only way to get you to fucking behave—“ His voice is thin, barely there, muffling against Sam's skin in something like an open-mouthed kiss, and only his grip keeps Sam from getting knocked into the other end of the tub with the force of the next thrust.

The hand on Sam’s cheek softens, slides damp with sweat up over his forehead and into his hair, trembling tender until Dean knocks into him again, and his fingers dig into Sam’s scalp, start to knot in his hair to keep him in place. 

Sam is pliant, doesn’t know why. Movement seems impossible, now, with Dean inside of his body and the demon blood soothing and sparking everything it touches. The pain is still enormous, but every nerve inside him seems to be going haywire, firing off flashbulb bright in the dark. He feels like he’s floating.

He doesn’t know what it is—maybe self-preservation—but Sam finds himself trying dimly to remember when he first started dreaming of this, of him and Dean swallowing one another with their bodies instead of just their souls. He thinks it started before he even knew what that would mean, from before he had the words for it. Now he has too many: autosarcophagy; Jörmungandr; ouroboros. They are the creature compelled to eat itself.

Dean—or maybe it was a dream of Dean, it’s getting harder to keep track—told him he was sick inside, that Sam had always been full of poison, and part of Sam believes him. It’s not as though he has ever felt innocent; he has never been pure, not since a demon poured evil in through his mouth in the cradle. Dean said Sam couldn’t feel right unless he was feeding the poison in from the outside as well, and it felt wrong when Dean said it, hurt too much to bear, but Sam doesn’t know what else to call what is happening here. In this moment he is certain that a piece of the sickness that has been inside of him all along, festering in his heart, has escaped, has taken shape in the world like a tulpa or has possessed Dean like a spirit, and now it’s trying to crawl its way back inside his bones from the outside, like it can fill one of the black holes it left behind inside of him. Like it can come home.

Part of Sam wants Dean inside of him, completing the cycle. Part of Sam wants to grab hold of Dean and never let him go.

His free hand stretches up blindly, barely feels like it’s a part of him, doesn't feel under his own control. He finds Dean’s elbow, follows it up to his shoulder, his heaving chest. Dean’s jaw is rough under his hand with neglected stubble and Sam’s fingertips prickle with it, drift down to Dean’s throat, instead, can feel the pulse hammering in his carotid, the bobbing of shocked breaths behind his Adam's apple while he whispers feverish nothings, hungry and full of Sam's own need. Sam's hand spans the whole of Dean's throat easily.

Part of Sam wants to grab hold. To grab hold and never let go.


End file.
